


Twelve Steps

by twnkwlf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Nogitsune Allison, Nogitsune Stiles, Nogitsune Trauma, PTSD, Post-Episode: P.S., Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Stallison - Freeform, Unsafe Sex, season 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:15:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1262527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers holding her after the funeral, sobbing into her chest and feeling her nails dig into him, both of them knowing it was their fault that the person they loved the most was gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twelve Steps

**Author's Note:**

> I'm working with all the fan theories that Allison is also a Nogitsune. Possible triggers: mentions of alcoholism, mentions of panic attacks.

****Stiles likes to go to AA meetings and pretend he’s an alcoholic. They seem to believe it, either it’s the jitter in his leg or it’s just that, somewhere along the line, he became an excellent liar.

_I’m Stiles and I’m an alcoholic._

__

“Hi, Stiles.”

_I’ve been sober for over a year._

__

“Keep up the good work.”

_I changed when I killed my best friend. I drove, and I wasn’t in control, and I killed him. After that, I became myself again._

Sad faces, sympathetic faces. A woman with brown hair leans toward him and looks like she wants to be his sponsor. Some of them must be wondering why he’s not in jail for manslaughter. The lie doesn’t have to be that thought out, not like it used to be when he was lying to his dad about werewolves. Back then the lies had been like holding up a house of cards; strategic, infuriating. This lie is just a card trick.

_I think about it every day. All day. It’s all I think about, actually, all the time. And I just keep. I don’t...I don’t even know why it started. Why I started drinking. I don’t know how it got ahold of me so quickly, but it was like..I just couldn’t fight it anymore. I just let it take over. And it killed him, it killed Scott, and I always knew it was going to kill someone. Part of me thinks that it I had just fought it, fought harder, maybe he’d be alive._

__

“Step One, Stiles.”

He looks down at the twelve-step pamphlet, folded and folded. He’s brought this same pamphlet to 50 different meetings. Sometimes he drives out of town to find a new place, some Church basement, some empty store room. It’s the same faces looking at him in the circle-- haggard, some of them hungover, some of them happy.

Inevitably, looking down at step one, he thinks of Scott’s face. Allison’s face behind him, holding him down. Usually the fox didn’t let him see what he was doing with Stiles’s body, kept him in darkness. But the fox made sure he was awake to watch it.  He was being pulled like on a string, thinking about Deaton’s lessons on the Kanima lore; a puppet, and a puppeteer.

The fox inside Allison said to him, “sever the body and the body won’t heal,” which was werewolf mythology printed on the pages of the bestiary in archaic latin, and a surefire way to kill a werewolf, Stiles remembered.  Lydia screamed. The fox ignored it. Stiles’s hands had never felt a sword before. Stiles’s hands brought the knife down and cut Scott in half. Isaac and Derek were snarling, howling. Stiles screamed somewhere on the inside. The fox ignored that, too.

“Step One: we admitted we were powerless over alcohol-- that our lives had become unmanageable.”

He nods.

_Powerless._

They give him a one year chip. He adds it to his collection.

***

Allison is walking home when a cat starts to stalk her. She sets down all her textbooks and her notebooks on the curb, crouching even though she’s wearing a skirt. The cat is young, but pregnant. It arches against her leg. Its brown and white, and skinny except for in the middle, where she’s swollen like she’s sore.

“Hi baby girl,” she says to it.

It meows back at her, and that’s it, she’s taking the cat. She’s made up her mind. She picks her up and the cat is splayed against her chest, freaked out. She eats canned tuna when they’re home, creeps around the house, skittish and funny. Allison sits on the sofa and watches her play with the cords of Stiles’s Xbox, which is dusty and rarely used. She asks the upstairs neighbor, who has cats, if she can borrow a few scoops of kitty litter and she makes a makeshift litter box out of an old tupperware container that she’d used to move in last year. The container is still marked Photo Albums because that’s where she’d packed the photo albums and a few boxes of pictures that Lydia printed off.

And when the cat takes a piss in the box, she starts to wonder where the photo albums even are because Stiles was the one who unpacked everything last year. She hadn’t wanted to be indoors when they first got to school. She had walked to the campus and pretended to be nice with some of the hipster girls who sat around the quad smoking cigarettes and ignoring the frosh week events. Stiles stayed at their off-campus apartment move them in with help from his dad. She went out and got drunk with the hipster girls and couldn’t remember her new address later that night, and had three missed calls from Stiles and one from her father, and she’d stumbled into the right apartment, where all of her shit was organized on bookshelves and her bed was even made, and Stiles was already asleep in his room.

She doesn’t know where he put the photo albums.

Three hours later, she has searched every corner of the house, she’s pacing the hallway, and the cat is dancing under her feet. She’s pulled a little of her hair out by accident, bitten her tongue. She’s so mad she can’t find the photo albums. She’ll eviscerate Stiles when he gets back. She’ll cut him in half like he cut Scott in half and the blood will spray on her face the way Scott’s had sprayed on her face. She screams and punches the wall. Leaves a dent, hurts her hand, but there’s no blood or wound at least so she can hide it.

“Where did you put the photo albums?” she asks him as soon as he comes in the door half an hour later.

“Um, is that a cat?”

 

It is a cat, and it skids away from Stiles.

“Where are they? I’ve been looking for...literally three hours.” She starts to dig around in the closet that she’s already dug around in twice.

“They’re under your bed,” he says.

She hadn’t checked under there because she hasn’t slept in that bed for a while now, has she? She kind of forgot it was there. It deflates her.

She goes to the  kitchen and opens another can of tuna for the cat. He gets something from the fridge, runs his hand along her arm and her back as a tactile hello.

“Do you wanna look at the photo albums?”

No, she doesn’t actually. She just wanted to know where they were. She shakes her head.

 

“Are you okay?” he says. He puts his chin on her shoulder, bending low next to her ear. She hates that question, it’s a terrible question that she never wants to respond to because she doesn’t like the answer, either way.

“Can we keep the cat?” she asks.

***

The cat watches them fuck. It’s weird. He can’t focus on her long enough to come. He’s a little distracted, which pisses her off so she flips them over, pulls him out, and rubs herself on him enough that it’s torture for him and heaven for her .

 

He knows it’s going to be one of those marathon nights where they keep going until Stiles can’t take the burn in his thighs any longer. She wants to keep the lights on because watching themselves gets her into it, but Stiles has had a long day of driving, and his eyes burn a little from tiredness. So he lies there and lets her do most of the work. He puts his fingers on her clit, but lets her rut against it.  

The cat meows, hops on the bed halfway through her second orgasm and she doesn’t notice, just bends down so her breath is hot in his face and he can barely suck her lip into his mouth. He bites her and she loses it once more, voice tightening around something obscene. Allison survives on multiple orgasms that rock through her at least four times when they fuck. Stiles could hardly take it at first, when they started, because the tightness and the wetness overwhelmed him. She’s not as shy in bed as she is outside. She mutters obscenities and practically dances on his dick, furious, urgent, careless.

When he comes, it always feels like it lasts minutes. Maybe it does. He bites her finger, seeing white.

Scott never talked about their sex life. He never offered the details, and Stiles had been a horny teenager, a virgin, with a friend who had made it into the realm of dating, and he had just wanted to know what it was like.

He ties the condom, gets rid of it, and slips his boxers back on. The cat settles at their feet. She just stays naked until her breathing slows back to normal. He places a kiss on her breast and then her collarbone.

Allison has a little star shaped birthmark on the line of her pelvis. That was the only detail Scott had ever shared with Stiles to prove he’d actually had sex with her. Stiles bends down toward her hip and kisses the birthmark, which makes her jump.

***

Chris makes unexpected visits every now and then. In the morning, Allison is standing in her bra, brushing her teeth, when she hears a knock at the front door. The door opens a second later because her dad has no boundaries, and lets himself in with only a courtesy knock as if this is her bedroom and not her apartment. The cat races by the bathroom and she realizes that it’s going to make a bolt for the front door, so she runs after it, toothbrush in mouth, in her underwear.

“The caah,” she says around her toothbrush. Chris scoops her up and shuts the door right before she flees. Then Allison feels stupid, standing there naked.

“Could you try knocking, maybe? What if she ran away?” she shouts to her dad as she grabs her robe from the bathroom .The apartment is small and sound travels.

 

“Then you’d chase her down the block in your underwear?” Stiles’s voice comes from the kitchen.

“Your cat is going to have a litter,” her dad says. She rinses her mouth quickly and walks back into the living room. Stiles has picked the cat up and is examining her belly.

“Oh yeah, shit,” he says.

“It’s fine...we’ll get them adopted.”

“I told you never to feed a stray,” Chris says.

“Well, she’s mine now.” And it gives her an displaced sense of pride knowing that she has her own thing to take care of. Maybe this feeling is why old cat ladies exist. She crouches down and reaches out her hand, but the cat isn’t interested.

Stiles goes back to his homework in the kitchen at the table. Her dad hands her a set of keys.

“The new prius,” he says.

“Dad, no.”

“Take the keys. You need a car.”

“Stiles’s jeep runs just fine. Plus we walk to campus.”

Chris raises his eye skeptically, looks like he wants to make a comment about how the jeep is a piece of shit or something, but Allison sighs. There’s a cut on the side of Chris’s neck. She wonders who did it or how it got there, and if there’s trouble in Beacon Hills. Stiles’s dad would have called them if there was trouble, wouldn’t he?

“Sorry I can’t stay, I’ve got to get to work in twenty minutes,” she tells him, pulling the tie out of her hair.

Her dad reaches over to kiss her on top of the head.

“You can drive there in your new prius.”

He keeps doing this, trying to take care of her this way, sending her money she doesn’t need, polishing the archery equipment that’s locked up in the room she doesn’t use, bringing her a car she doesn’t want to drive. He’d wanted to move here with them last year, but she told him to stay in Beacon Hills, she told him that she needed the distance. It had just been the two of them for so long. She wonders if he’s lonely.

“I’ll call you later.”

“Thank you for the car, Dad, really.”

He says a goodbye to Stiles, kicks the cat out of the way, and leaves because she’s not exactly sure how to carry on a conversation with him anymore.

When he’s gone, she gets breakfast and Stiles is rubbing the cat’s belly. He says,

“Let’s name her Rosemary.”

 

***

He doesn’t cry a lot now. Every once in a while there are panic attacks, and Allison will force feed him his anxiety meds. Tears come then, but the pills slow him down

Or, you know, something will happen on TV, some song will come on that is tangled into a good memory, and the confusion of happiness and grief can incapacitate him. Stiles has been through all this before with his mother.

 

When he was nine, Scott went to summer camp without him because his dad was still in debt from the funeral and they couldn’t afford to pay for recreation. It was the worse summer of his little life. His mother’s things were not yet packed up, so would make belief that she was there still there,but he couldn't make believe that Scott was home no matter how many times he rode his bike up and down his street. He really didn't have any other friends. Sometimes he would lie in his bed on those hot summer nights and cry out of frustration.

He couldn't make believe that Scott was at summer camp now. And he still doesn’t really have any other friends, but he hasn’t cried much about it in the past year.

He and Allison walk to class one morning with their hands together. Acquaintances say hi to them. They haven’t really befriended anyone at school except each other.

How can Stiles explain it? All the years he was in love with Lydia Martin dissolved when Lydia came to him, at the end, when the nogitsune was dead. He went to Allison instead. He met her eyes. Their eyes knew each other’s, he knew her mind, he knew her better than anyone because he knew the particularities of being possessed and he knew that they were partners in that big, fucked up psychological crime. He remembers holding her after the funeral, sobbing into her chest and feeling her nails dig into him, both of them knowing it was their fault that the person they loved the most was gone.

Because she’d held him down and Stiles had cut him in half (Step One: we admitted we were powerless).

Allison is his friend. They spent the summer before college together (and those were the days with lots of tears). They shut everyone else out, he knows that, even their fathers. Lydia wanted to take care of them, but left for school early and he doesn’t blame her one bit for it. Lydia comes to visit as much as she can, doting over them, maternal and lovely. Isaac hasn’t talked to them in a year. Derek stayed in town to protect the territory.

He really doesn’t know how to describe it. For the summer, they suffered in the heat. They woke from bad dreams, dampened each other’s shoulders, visited Scott’s grave too much. They spilled out every word to explain every feeling of losing their mothers, of the nogitsune dreams, of violation, of losing Scott, of feeling unsafe now, always. She locked up her bows and arrows and he powered down his computer. They spent a lot of time doing nothing in each other’s rooms, holding hands, sleeping in the same bed, and their parents would say nothing about it because they were cracked like little bone china cups. He learned her like the back of his hand. He lost his virginity to her in a confused moment. They did what they had to do, filling obvious holes that Scott left.

But it’s the only thing he’ll ever want. It’s the only thing he’s got.

They live together, they fuck together, they have a cat together now. They pretend, very successfully, that they have a normal relationship.

"Love you," she says with a kiss on the cheek.

"Love you."

They go to their respective classes.

If it were normal, he would feel guilt because she was Scott’s for so long. Stiles doesn’t feel guilty because he needs her more than anything. She is water and food.

***

The cat gives birth a few nights later when they are asleep. Allison wakes up to the little noises coming from somewhere in the room. Little mews.

Inside the drawer with Stiles’s sweaters, she finds the cat and three little things squirming to get at her milk. Her heart flares in her chest for a moment because they’re sweet, and new, and hungry. The mother lies her head back tiredly. Allison notices that there are two small bundles off to the side, as far away from the other kittens as possible. She knows they are dead things before she picks them up, and they are still wet with blood, and they are cold.

Her fingers shake. The cat was young, and some of the kittens didn’t make it, and it happens.

She carries them out to the kitchen, doesn’t want to wake Stiles up. She puts them inside a little cardboard pop tart box, washes her hands, dries them. Out in the backyard, she gets the shovel from the landlord’s tool shed and digs a little hole at the side of the house. It’s late and no one walks by, which she’s happy for, because it would make her look crazy.

She just wants to bury them because the mother shouldn’t have to see them on her periphery. She should enjoy her new kittens.

 

After, Stiles is awake in the bedroom and looking down at the drawer, reaching inside to pet the cat’s tired, deflated belly. His eyes catch the only light in the room, coming from the hallway.

 

“They’re so fuckin’ cute, oh my god.”

Allison decides not to tell him about the ones who died.

***

The English department is having a pub night, and Allison is berated into going because her workshop partner insists.

Stiles doesn’t really mind if they go or not, but he wouldn’t mind a drink. It’s better if they drink in public, otherwise the wrong thought alone can send them spinning into drunken sadness, which is the worst. Allison looks so beautiful. They drink a few glasses of wine at home while they eat dinner so by the time they meet up with the larger group, they’re already swaying together pleasantly.

The pub is nice and loud and crowded. Stiles avoids the whiskey, sticks to pints of beer. Allison likes wine. They drink until there are roses in their cheeks, and it becomes easier to carry on conversations. While they sit at a booth with another couple, Allison lets her hand drift up his thigh. Eventually, she’s dragging her fingers over his crotch under the table, and he shifts his hips subtly toward her, getting hard.

They have to go to the bathrooms. It’s busy, but the disabled toilet is easy to sneak into. She locks the door and pulls down her underwear in one go, He moves to her, leaning against the sink, putting his hands on either side of her. She slides onto him, and they don’t have a condom, but they take the chance because she feels like silk and death closing around him at once. Her hips quake into his. He slaps a hand over her mouth to keep her whimpers at a minimum, but God, he could scream from it, too. When they get close, it gets weird, like it does sometimes. He holds her neck and she holds his and they can’t look away from each other’s face or they won’t get there. He wishes he could tell Scott about how much he loves Allison, about how he wants to just keep her safe, keep her here. Scott would want this, he thinks, because it’s pure. He’s never lied to Allison and he never will.

When she comes, he follows, and doesn’t even try to pull out. All buried inside her, he comes with her arms around him. He forgets they’re in a bathroom at a bar.

She kisses him slowly before they get back on their jelly legs

***

Allison wakes up in the morning on top of his shoulder, hair spreading out onto his back. He snores a little, but she doesn’t mind. She had a bad dream and it’s put a weight in her stomach. It happens. She breathes through the morning for a few minutes, wanting to stay close to his body heat, wondering if he’ll be up for shower sex or if he’ll go down on her, at least, because she’s feeling achy and he always makes it better.

Two of the kittens crawl up to their heads. She hides a little laugh in the pillow because one of them is dancing on Stiles’s back, playing with her hair like it’s yarn. They’re tawny and little, and their meows are just squeaks.

She scoops them up and holds them close.

***

_My name is Stiles and I’m an alcoholic._

“Hi, Stiles.”

_I’ve been sober for…two years, now._

“Congratulations.”

_I had this brother, Scott. I wasn’t in control of the vehicle and I killed him._

He goes on. He tells them the things that Allison and him haven’t talked about in a year. They nod like they understand. They haven’t been possessed by demons, but they must understand a little.

_I don’t know how it took over so fast. I couldn’t even move...I was a monster._

“Step One, Stiles; we admitted we were powerless over alcohol-- that our lives had become out of control.”

Thinking back on the moment it happened, looking down at Allison’s face as she pressed Scott down into the dirt, he sees that it wasn’t Allison’s face looking up at him. It wasn’t his face looking down at her. It was just Scott in the middle. He was always going to bring that sword down. He couldn’t drop it, the fox wouldn’t let him drop it, the fox wouldn’t stop. It was always going to kill, he knows that.

_I was out of control. Powerless. Yeah._

He thinks of Allison who dropped him off and went to get supplies from the Petsmart for the kittens that have taken the apartment over. Usually he feels cold in these meetings, but he feels a little warm as they talk to him about step two.

Before he leaves, they give him a two-year chip that he can add to his collection. He folds up the twelve-step pamphlet, puts it in his pocket for another meeting. Someday he’ll make it to step three.


End file.
